JAMAICA PLAIN - On a sunny Sunday in February, the birds are chirping at Jamaica Pond as local singer-songwriter Casey Dienel reflects on her art.
"I want to make something that lasts, regardless of whether or not I successfully accomplish it," she says, perched on a park bench. "That sentiment is pretty much inextricable from what I do, that need to make something that lasts."
Dienel, 22, writes strange, slanted pop songs that mirror her love of jazz with song titles such as "Lindberghs and Metal Birds" or the Greek muse "Calliope," as sung in her diving, swooping voice. Her birthday is looming, and she slips and claims it's March 4, which is wrong - that's the release date of her new album, "Phylactery Factory," which very well could catapult her into the national spotlight.
It's been a year of changes for Dienel, starting with a move back to Jamaica Plain, "where I run into people I know," after a brief stint in Brooklyn. Then, she switched to a new label interested in "classicism," Dead Oceans (an offshoot of the hip indie labels Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar).
Now Dienel's dance card is booked with spring tours alongside ex-Concrete Victoria Bergsman's Taken by Trees (for whom she opens tonight at the Museum of Fine Arts), Bon Iver, and labelmate Phosphorescent. But the biggest change in Dienel's life was the decision to record under the name White Hinterland after 2006's debut, "Wind-Up Canary," released under her own name.
"Canary" was the sound of a bedroom musician emerging with giddy songs loaded with hooks and quirky lyrics that played out like inquisitive character studies. "Dr. Monroe," for example, was the story of a smooth-talking loon riding a European train. But instead of three-minute pop songs, the riffs on "Factory" are mysterious, dense, and jazzy, and it takes several listens for the melodies to rise from the mix of instruments anchored by Dienel's piano and keyboards. Her lyrics are oblique and beautiful, highlighted by oceanic images and evocative words ("mackinaw," "mitrailleuse").
Longtime friend and fan Camille McGregor, from local pop duo Ponies in the Surf, says in an e-mail exchange that she has seen firsthand Dienel's evolution. "I gushed and confided to her after the show that what she's doing is fantastic and inspiring and makes me incredibly proud, too. I want to see her play at the finest venues for sophisticated listeners."
Dienel, a petite blonde whose mop of hair made it easy to dress up as Garth from "Wayne's World" one Halloween, is adamant that despite her youth, she is not "cuddly and cute and little." There's a darkness creeping through her art, whether it's the surreal story of a beached whale in "A Beast Washed Ashore" or in "Napoleon at Waterloo," where Dienel and her band suggest the toils of war by playing around with the repetition of the phrase, "There goes now/ Another man down." Even the delicate and seemingly adorable cover art by her craft buddy Shawn Creeden holds sinister secrets: At Dienel's request, it depicts a carnivorous scene of hyenas feasting on a zebra.
Being herself, it turns out, is the driving force behind her music. At a show earlier this month at P.A.'s Lounge in Somerville, White Hinterland's performance with Dienel's touring band made up of Conservatory friends on drums, violin, and bass made the room fall silent. The singer introduced "Hometown Hooray" with a nerdy confession. In high school, she said, she would skip out on gym requirements, preferring to double up on classes in Greek mythology and Latin. While translating Ovid's "Metamorphoses" for her Scituate High classes, she was struck by the blunt writing and cites a particular passage: "Where if a man was dead, 'his blood would make the Tigris River.' "
Launching into the song, Dienel's fingers ran over rhythmically tricky keyboard lines as she vividly sang her careful words, gathered with some inspiration from the Greeks: "Your blood dripped red anemones that shimmered just like precious stones/They floated down the river back to the tributary that now shares your name."
Her voice rang out over the final line, stalwart and true and heartbreaking as her fingers alternately skittered and loped over the keyboard. "No one wants to believe you died in vain," she sang over a meandering, poppy melody.
She may write hummable refrains, but she says, "I don't play piano like a pop pianist." She studied composition at the New England Conservatory of Music, and her listening habits include "weird jazz" she eagerly cites as an inspiration, like the hard-edge rhythm of Cecil Taylor, Alice Coltrane, and Abdullah Ibrahim. She also mentions her love of the impressionistic and undulating work of Debussy and Ravel.
As a piano player, she's equally able to play clompy chords, classical cadences, and dissonant notes. Dienel's musical fluency extends to instruments such as accordion, ukulele, cello, and some guitar. For her "Factory" sessions, Dienel wrote a manifesto for herself and the players. In it, she discusses the feelings, emotions, and textures that she wanted for her new album. She reveals writing about a drum line that "needs to sound like when light shines on a rusty copper tin roof."
Reflecting on that description, with her hands buried in the folds of her cozy grandma sweater, she concludes, "I don't think it works to describe things in a really clinical way."
